Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

If you want to insult a woman, call her a prostitute. If you want to insult a man, call him a woman.

There are two types of semantic change: pejoration is where a word starts out with a neutral or positive meaning and eventually devolves to mean something negative. The opposite is called amelioration.

That we have used language to systematically reduce women to edible, nonhuman, and sexual entities for so many years is no coincidence. Instead, it makes a clear statement about the expectations, hopes, and fears of our society as a whole.

Simply put, slurs go out of style at the same time the underlying belief in them does.

while men’s speech style can be categorized as “competitive,” women’s is “cooperative.”

“Language is not always about making an argument or conveying information in the cleanest, simplest way possible. It’s often about building relationships. It’s about making yourself understood and trying to understand someone else.”

What rubs people the wrong way about political correctness is not that they can’t use certain words anymore, it’s that political neutrality is no longer an option.